The Joys of Teaching Literature, started in September 2010 and with a Spanish version since July 2021, is a blog for ranting and raving about (teaching and researching) English Literature, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies, and other aspects of the Anglophone world. I publish a post once a week, usually on Monday. Please, download the yearly volumes from https://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328, or read the volume collecting some of the entries (Passionate Professing: The Context and Practice of English Literature, 2023). The comments option is not available, sorry, but you may contact me through my e-mail address, Sara.Martin@uab.cat. The contents of this blog are protected by a type 4 Creative Common License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)).

  • OLIVER’S BASTARDY: BEYOND THE WORKHOUSE AND INTO THE LAW

    Typically, there comes a point when after reading a particular book six or seven times, a new angle opens up and I wonder how come I’d missed that. In the case of Dickens’s Oliver Twist perhaps this has much to do with having overlooked the details of the rocambolesque explanation of the connection between the…

  • WE ARE THE BEST!!!: ON HOW THAT FEELS… (SWEATY)

    On Wednesday 12 I learned that according to ‘QS World University Rankings 2012-2013’, the university I work for, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, is the best in Spain, followed by the Universitat de Barcelona. It is also number 176 in the list of the top 200 in the world (QS considers 2,500 universities in total, 700…

  • IS TRASH ALWAYS TRASH?: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE FILM WARRIOR

    It often happens that suddenly a particular actor starts appearing in a number of well-publicised films without being himself particularly famous (or at least, not here). After seeing English actor Tom Hardy in Inception; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and as the masked Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, and knowing he’d played Sikes and Heathcliff…

  • FREEING RESEARCH FROM THE MARKET: THE BRITISH CASE (AND CHINA MIÉVILLE)

    A colleague emailed me back in July yet another article on this new phenomenon I’ve been discussing here in fits and starts: the demand that research be freed from the market. This time it was the turn of The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21559317) to announce that “Academic journals face a radical shake-up.” The main arguments are the…

  • HOW MANY LAYERS TO THIS CAKE?: CONSIDERING SF WRITERS

    I am spending a good deal of my holidays reading SF, this time not so much at random and for pleasure but, rather, trying to update my (always tottering…) knowledge of the field in a more systematic fashion. Like any other contemporary genre, SF is fast evolving and it’s very hard to grasp which new…